Freshman

The alarm went at ten to five, and it went in the ear of a man who was already awake.

Tyler was at the desk under the window, in the hood, with the headphones on, in the blue light of the two screens, where in a forest in the dark it was snowing; and the telephone on the desk beside the keyboard lit up and began to make a noise like a small bird being reasonable, and Tyler looked at it.

He looked at it for some time with an expression of deep betrayal.

“It’s going off,” said Tyler.

“You set it.”

“I know I set it.” Tyler picked it up and looked at the word on the screen, SUN, as though it had been written there by somebody else. “I’m awake.”

“Mr Luna said you would be.”

“I know what Mr Luna said.” He turned it off, carefully, with one finger, and put it face down on the desk. Then he sat for a moment with his hands on the keyboard, and on the screens the fire burned high in the middle of the ring of huts, orange and then yellow, with the thirty-four standing back from it in their furs; and at the edge of the ring, half buried, with a lamp in its window, was the hut with the board over its door that said FREDS.

“Jussi,” said Tyler, into the microphone. “Hey. I’m going.” A pause. “Yeah. The hill.” Another. “No, I know it comes up every day, man, we did this.” He listened. “Okay. You’ve got wood. Thanks.”

He took the headphones off. He took them all the way off, and wound the cable round them, and put them on the desk beside the keyboard, and pushed back the chair, and stood up, in the hoodie, with the sleeves over his hands.

“It’s seventy-eight,” said Frederick.

“It’s my hoodie,” said Tyler.

---

The jumper was on the shelf over the desk by the door, folded, in its maroon with the gold bands at the cuffs, with the card still under it in her small upright hand, For October. M. It had been to the A in October and to the top of the butte in February, and to Christmas in a closed hall, and it would go into a box today for the summer, and come out again.

He left it where it was.

Beside it, back where Jack had put it on Wednesday morning before the tram, there was the white cricket hat. He took it down and put it on.

Tyler looked at it.

“That’s Jack’s.”

“His grandfather’s.”

“It’s for the hill?”

“It’s for when I go back up,” said Frederick. “He said.”

Tyler considered the hat for a while, with his head on one side, the way he looked at a thing on a screen before he decided whether to go in.

“It’s a good hat,” he said at last, generously, and opened the door.

---

There were twelve suns on it.

There was the one that said TYLER, which nobody had ever stolen, at the top, where Priya had put it in August. And under it, down the door of 312 to the level of the handle, in four rows, there were twelve that said FRED: the one from last Thursday, and the eleven that had come across the road on Wednesday in a brown envelope, which he had put back up at midnight, because a woman in Gloucestershire had said that you put things back where you found them.

Tyler stood in the corridor and looked at the door.

“That’s a lot of Freds,” said Tyler.

“Kimura found them.”

“Where?”

“Everywhere.”

Tyler looked at the door a moment longer. Then he reached out, and peeled one off, from the bottom row, carefully, with the tape still on its corners, and looked at it, and folded it in half, and put it in the front pocket of the hoodie.

“My grandma,” said Tyler. “She likes it to be somebody’s.”

---

Mr Luna was at the desk at the end of his shift, in the cardigan, with the radio off and the crossword finished in pen and the western closed on top of it.

On the clipboard the column went down from 10 p.m. 79 to 4 a.m. 76, and he was waiting for the grey box on the wall to say five; and on the desk in front of him, beside the butterscotch and the paper sun that said IGNACIO, there were four plastic bottles of water, frozen solid, white all through.

He looked at them over his glasses: at the shorts, and the cap that was a cricket hat, and the hoodie with the sleeves over its hands.

“Where you going, son?”

“The butte.”

“What’d I tell you?”

“Drink water. Call my mother. Don’t go up the butte in August.”

“And what month is it?”

“May.”

Mr Luna looked at him for a long moment with no expression at all.

“May’s August,” said Mr Luna, “with the door open.” He pushed two of the bottles across the desk. Then he looked at Tyler, and pushed the other two. “Neck. Here.” He touched the side of his own neck, under the ear. “Not your head. Your neck.”

“Why my neck?” said Tyler.

“That’s where the blood goes past.”

Tyler picked up one of the bottles and held it against the side of his neck, under the ear, through the hood, and his face changed.

“Oh,” said Tyler.

“Yeah,” said Mr Luna. He looked at the grey box on the wall. It had gone to five. He picked up the pen. “Come down before it’s up properly,” he said, and wrote 5 a.m. 77.

“Will you be here in August?” said Frederick.

Mr Luna did not look up from the clipboard.

“Thirty-one years in October,” he said. “Where else would I be?”

---

Rhys and Sam were in the arcade outside the doors.

Rhys was in his running kit, with the pack on his back and the clear plastic tube coming round over his shoulder to its valve on his chest, and for the first time since August it was the right thing to be wearing, and he knew it, and stood a little straighter in it. Sam was in jeans and the grey T-shirt with his hands in his pockets, and over one arm, furled, the black umbrella.

Tyler looked at the umbrella.

“It’s dark,” said Tyler.

“It won’t be,” said Sam.

Across the road, over the dentist’s, there was a light on behind the blind, which was halfway down, and as they came out from under the arcade it went down another inch; and Rhys’s telephone made a small sound in his pocket, and he took it out, and looked at it, and turned it round so that Frederick could read it.

Go. K.

---

The Avenue was warm in the dark.

The pavements were giving back the day, as they had in August, but gently, the way a kitchen gives back the heat of a stove turned off an hour ago. A street-sweeper went by on the far side with its orange light going round. And along the lamp posts, the length of the Avenue, in long loops from post to post, the King’s Day bunting was still up, three days after the day it was for, sagging a little in the middle now, in the March’s colours, moving very slightly over their heads in the warm air, because nobody had got round to taking it down and nobody minded.

Outside the bar with the trough, a girl in a party dress was sitting on the kerb with her shoes in her lap and a slice of pizza, at the end of the last night of the year, and as they came past she looked up.

She looked at Frederick, and at the hat, and at the man with the tube on his chest and the man with the umbrella, and her face did not change at all.

“Morning,” she said, with her mouth full. And then, with real warmth, past him: “Hey, Tyler.”

“Hey, Maddie,” said Tyler.

They walked on. Frederick walked for a while along the warm pavement under the bunting, and then he looked at Tyler.

“Who’s Maddie?”

“From the dining hall,” said Tyler, holding the frozen bottle to his neck. “She asked me about Finland.”

At the top of the Avenue, where it ran out against the dark, there was the butte.

---

The green board on its post at the gate said PATH OPEN, and under it, smaller, in white, SUNRISE 5.34, and under that CLOSES 9 A.M. TODAY. INDEX TAKEN AT THIS SITE; and on the post under the board, faded almost white, there was the laminated notice with the drawing of a man lying down.

IN SUMMER, CLIMB BEFORE SUNRISE OR NOT AT ALL.

Tyler read it.

“Is it summer?”

“It’s May,” said Rhys.

“That’s what I said,” said Tyler, and went through the gate.

There was nobody at the gate. There was the low stone wall, and the post, and the green light on the gravel where in February somebody had stood with her hands folded and a paper bag in them; and Frederick looked at the place as he went past it, and then up the path into the dark, where she would have looked.

---

Tyler was not fit.

He had said so at the gate, in so many words, I’m not, like, fit, and it was true, and he went up the old steps cut in the rock, the ones worn hollow in the middle by a century of feet, with one hand on the wall and the frozen bottle on his neck, slowly, breathing, at the pace of a man who has spent the year at a desk under a window keeping a fire going for thirty-four strangers; and Frederick went up beside him at the same pace, and Rhys went ahead with a torch, and Sam came behind with the other and did not say anything about the time.

“How many steps is this?” said Tyler, at the first bend.

“Depends if you count the little ones,” said Sam.

At the second bend, where the low iron fence ran along the slope below the A, Frederick stepped off the path.

The gate in the fence stood open, as it always stood, on the few dozen old graves among the rocks, and he went along the end of them in the torchlight to the plain grey stone at the end with nothing carved on it but the letters, RUTH ABERNATHY, 1914 to 1991, and the row of small round pebbles along its top edge, longer now than in September, a dozen or more, put there one at a time by people going up. He picked one up off the path and put it at the end of the row.

Tyler had followed him to the gate in the fence and was standing in it.

“Who’s that?”

“The heat lady.”

“The thermometer lady?” Tyler looked at the stone. “With the lab? With the swinging thing?”

“Yes.”

Tyler came along the end of the graves in the dark, and looked at the stone for a while, at the name and the two years and nothing else, with the frozen bottle against his neck. Then he bent down, slowly, and picked up a pebble off the path, and looked at it, and put it on the top of the stone beside Frederick’s, carefully, so that it would not roll.

“She let me swing it,” said Tyler. “The girl at the lab. In September.” He straightened up. “It was cool.”

---

Halfway up, the path came round a corner and went across the top of the A.

Tyler stopped. He stood on the path above it with his hand on the maroon rail and looked down at it in Rhys’s torchlight, at the edge of it lying there right at his feet, enormous, its two legs going away down into the dark.

“Is that the A?”

“Yes.”

“You did that.”

“Everybody did.”

“I was in a raid,” said Tyler. He crouched, with some difficulty, and put his hand on the edge of it, where it showed its layers end on, like the pages of a book, with the coat from the eighteenth of October on top and, deep down by the rock, a thin line of white.

“There’s a white one,” said Tyler. “At the bottom.”

“It was white once.”

Tyler looked at the white line for a while, crouching, with his hand on the paint.

“Huh,” he said, and stood up, and went on up.

---

The top was small and warm and nearly empty.

It was the rough little plateau of broken rock, no bigger than a tennis court, with the low fence round the aerials and the red light on the tallest blinking to itself, and the flat stones round the edge; and on the east side, on his own stone, with a thermos between his feet and a cup in his hand, looking east, there was the old man in the white cap.

He looked round when they came over the top. He nodded, once, the way he nodded, which was an entry in a register.

“May,” said the old man.

“Yes.”

“Thought so.” He poured from the thermos. “Always come back in May. When it’s hot again. It’s the only time you can.” He drank, and looked past Frederick at Tyler, who had come up the last step and was standing at the edge of the summit with the frozen bottle on his neck and his mouth open, looking at the Valley. “Who’s this?”

“Tyler.”

The old man considered Tyler over the cup.

“First time?” he said.

Tyler turned his head.

“Yeah.”

“Thought so.” The old man screwed the cup back on the thermos. “You’ll stop by October.”

Tyler looked at him for a long moment, from inside the hood.

“I haven’t started,” said Tyler.

The old man looked at him a moment longer, and something happened under the white cap, at the corners, and went away again; and he turned back to the east, and did not say anything else.

---

Below them, on every side, the Valley was still lit, to the edge of the world, in its long straight lines of orange lamps; and to the west the morning bank was going out of the airport, one aircraft and then two minutes later another, because the air was thick enough at half past five to carry them and would not be at noon.

Tyler stood at the edge of the summit and looked at all of it.

“You can see the whole thing,” said Tyler.

“Yes.”

“I didn’t know you could see the whole thing.” He turned round slowly, in a full circle, with the frozen bottle on his neck, the way Jack had turned in the car park on Monday with his arms out. “Is that ours?” He was pointing at a long low block of concrete with fins on it, a mile off across the palms, with a few lit windows in it at the end. “Is that Palo Verde?”

“Yes.”

Tyler looked at it for a long time.

“There’s our window,” he said.

Rhys had his telephone out, with the screen dimmed, as he had it every morning, and Frederick looked at it over his shoulder: half past two in the afternoon in Stockholm, half past one in London, half past eight in New Westminster, and in all three of them, and in the twelve others, a Friday in May in which nothing had happened anywhere and the box would come across the road at a quarter to seven and wait under the poster of the federal tax brackets as it had every morning since August. Rhys put the telephone away.

Sam had the notebook out.

He wrote in it, standing by the old man’s stone with the umbrella over his arm, in pencil, and Frederick did not need to look to know where, because he had watched Sam write in that column since August and leave it alone from October to February and write in it once since.

“Thirty-six,” said Sam.

“Out of what?” said Tyler.

Sam looked at the column for a while.

“It’s not out of anything,” said Sam. He closed the notebook on the pencil. “It’s just how many.”

---

They went and stood on the east side, a little way from the old man, by the edge.

The sky over the mountains was going grey, and then not grey; it went, very quickly, to the pale clean yellow of the inside of a lemon, along the whole line of the ridge, further north along it than in February, and the mountains stood up black against it with their tops ragged like torn paper.

“Five thirty-four,” said Sam, behind them, at five thirty-four. “Plus mountains.”

Tyler stood beside him at the edge with the frozen bottle against his neck, looking at the yellow, and did not say anything for some time. Then, without turning his head, he said:

“So what does a king actually do?”

Frederick looked at him.

“You know what he does.”

“I know.” Tyler was still looking at the ridge. “Tell me anyway. With fifteen.”

So Frederick began. He said that mostly the King read. He said that every morning there was a box, and in it were the things the governments had decided, fourteen of them and now one more, and he read every one to the end, including the parts in small type, and wrote his initial in the top corner of each in pencil to say that he had read it and for nothing else; and that the yes was in ink at the bottom, and was somebody else’s; and that the fifteenth was the easiest, because in Sweden the King did less than anywhere in the world, and opened the Riksdag in the autumn, and saw the Prime Minister on Tuesdays, and that his mother had listened to the whole of every budget for twenty-four years, and that he had been meaning to ask her how; and he had got further, he thought, than he had ever got, standing up, in daylight, with somebody listening, when Tyler put out a hand without looking and took hold of his sleeve.

“Hang on,” said Tyler.

“Seventeen,” said Sam, behind them, very quietly.

Frederick stopped.

On the ridge to the east, exactly at the place where the old man was looking, as if he had been told, there was a point of light on the edge of the mountains so bright that it was not a colour at all.

---

It came up fast.

It came up the way it had come up in August, in a rush, as though it had been waiting behind the mountains with its engines running, and the whole upper edge of it was over the ridge in a few seconds; and the light came across the Valley towards them, across the grid of lamps, which went pale under it one after another, mile after mile, and across the lake, which went from black to bronze from end to end in one long flash, and across the roofs of the campus and the long concrete block with the fins on it a mile off, and up the side of the butte, over the A and the pebbles on the grey stone and the stepped path, and onto the two of them at the edge.

It was warm. It was not the oven of August, and it was not the cold clear light of February with nothing in it. It came onto his face and his arms like a hand laid there, the first warmth of the day, and he stood in it in Jack’s grandfather’s hat and felt it come, and did not take the hat off.

Tyler did not say anything.

He stood at the edge of the summit with the frozen bottle hanging forgotten in one hand and his face turned to it, and his mouth a little open, as it had been open at the top step when he first saw the Valley; and Frederick watched him out of the side of his eye, the way you watch somebody see a thing for the first time, and saw the light reach him, and go across his face, and into his eyes, which watered, and which he did not shut.

Then Tyler reached up with the hand that was not holding the bottle, and pushed back the hood.

He pushed it all the way back, off his head, for the first time Frederick had ever seen, so that it lay in folds on his shoulders, and stood bareheaded on the top of Hayden Butte in the sun at twenty to six in the morning, and pushed the sleeves of the hoodie back off his hands, up to the elbows, and let the light get at his arms.

“Oh,” said Tyler.

Behind them the old man poured himself another cup from the thermos, and drank it, and did not look round. Rhys stood with his hands on the straps of his pack. Sam opened the umbrella, slowly, with a soft sound, and held it over nobody.

“Does it do that every day?” said Tyler.

“Every day.”

Tyler looked at it a while longer, with his hood down and his arms bare and the water running out of the corners of his eyes, which he did not wipe.

“Okay,” said Tyler.

He sat down on the flat stone at the edge, beside the old man’s, with his elbows on his knees; and after a moment Frederick sat down beside him; and the two of them sat on the east side of the summit in the sun, a boy from Parma, Ohio, with his hood down, and a boy in a cricket hat, with nothing to do for an hour, and watched it come the rest of the way up.